A married couple (Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys) get a panicked phone call from their daughter (Megan McDonnell) saying she’s had a car accident in a forest, in this 2025 horror flick they should have called The Blair Ditch Project.

Following in the tracks of Welshman-in-a-car movie Locke, Hallow Road sees Rhys driving his wife to their daughter’s aid as they speak to her on the phone (though a video call would be more helpful), keeping us almost entirely inside the vehicle for 80 minutes. The challenge with this self-contained setup is making people talking in a car cinematic, and director Babak Anvari fails to drive much visual interest, not helped by expository dialogue that renders the drama less than convincing.

Then halfway through it takes a hard left turn into surprisingly spooky territory, turning the realist drama into a sort of M. Night Shyamalan psychological thriller, except it’s actually good. Anvari handles this gear-shift without losing its sincerity, introducing a metaphorical angle that re-routes the film from a road-tested moral dial-emma into a deeper meditation on guilt and parental responsibility.

Only showing the parents’ perspective injects an essential ambiguity, and requires strong performances (and interesting double roles) from the two leads. Pike brings a detached pragmatism to the paramedic mother, while Rhys shows parallels with his Widow’s Bay character as a nervy father desperate to protect his child, only without the laughs. The worst night of their lives only goes downhill, and while visually spare as a tyre, it achieves Peppa Pig levels of parental nightmare-fuel.